Bob Drake

Do you have to try to imagine tiny bones of dead birds left over in your parents' attic? See, because I don't think Bob Drake does. From what I can hear, he dreams this stuff up like we ponder the nature of brushing our teeth, as at ease with the disturbing as we are with the mundane. And it would be easy to dismiss him were it not for an alarmingly fertile basin of creativity and collaged, kitchen-sink songcraft. I've yet to hear a Drake song that sounded like anyone else, despite the fact I've tried on many occasions to compare him to other people. I tried with Yes and I tried with Tom Waits. I tried with Henry Cow and I tried a little later with Danny Elfmann. Dead birds, for that matter: when you start making these kinds of references, you're probably better off not making any at all. Have you heard this guy? He's pretty interesting.

Drake was born in 1957 in the Midwest USA, and learned how to play his friend's guitar when he was 12 or 13. "I didn't know how to play it in a 'normal' way or even tune it but loved making sounds and feedback with it". Later, after falling for Yes' Close to the Edge, he bought a Rickenbacker bass, which he still uses. In fact, these days, you might call him a "virtuoso," though that kind of word doesn't really do justice to him Ð not because he's all Yngwie Malmsteen on bass, but because his playing is really only important insofar as it allows him to do a bunch of stuff with songs that other people would love to do, but just can't. His most recent record begins with hard-panned banjos playing macabre-sentimental fanfares, Deliverance in the hands of Hitchcock; he plays almost everything on his records himself, from drums, to guitar, to violin and "trash". Some of this facility comes from paying dues ("played in all kinds of top 40 bands, country gigs, whatever"); most of it comes from being a natural badass.

Oh, and he's also worked with Ice Cube. Drake had a brief career as an L.A. studio engineer, doing sessions for George Clinton and Tina Turner, among others. Of course, on the side, he was working with experimental prog bands like 5uus, Hail and Thinking Plague. All in a decade's work, you understand. All of this is reflected in his own music, as is his more recent mastering work for Faust and Art Bears. Yet, Drake's solo releases are idiosyncratic to a fault. His vocals are sort of earthy and thin, like Van Dyke Parks or Jon Anderson, but capable of wails and bitter coughs like a grizzled performance artist. Elsewhere, he might whip out a bluegrass cover like a die-hard folkie. If I had to classify him, I'd place him in a sphere somewhere between Guided By Voices and Animal Collective, but even that seems off. Drake is understandably reticent to describe himself. "But how else can one describe music without at some point comparing it with some other music"? Tell me about it.

Drake's The Shunned Country, like 2002's excellent The Skull Mailbox (And Other Horrors), is something of a rural horror story, fleshed out with broken ambience and bizarro pop. It crams about 52 tracks into 40-odd minutes, though is hardly haphazard. Rather, the songs (titles range from "Just Ask Mr. Smith" to "Treatise on the Natural History of the Animal Life of the Mississippi Valley") are designed to employ as tight a form into the most compact space as possible. "The focus was definitely on the structure of each little piece, which should be clear if you give them a few listenings [sic]. Not that you have to even care about that...hopefully it's also just a good listen." Indeed it is, especially if nightmare pop is your thing. After all, each of us needs a little help picturing the scary shit that goes on in the attic.